Hi Guys,
I have made an offer to talk about my old yachts, but I have a problem.
Our photos are currently in storage!
So what I'd like to try is this...
If you have a photo of one of my old yachts, post it on here & I'll tell you its story
By storage I gather your'e not refering to electronic storage but those old shoe boxes eh
No TP1,
We sold our house & are in rented digs for a while, until move tp Goolwa.
My workshop & a whole host of other stuff in long term storage.
Part of retirement plan, hence blokart now.
never thought I would be looking forward to an evening of watching someone's slide collection.....
stephen
No, I actually meant your yacht after "green pea"!
(You can cheat & take a digital pic of a projected slide!)
Hi Folks,
Finally getting back to this. I found some pics from a talk I gave on Vindicator so I'll start with that if that's OK.
This is the story of how Vindicator came about, but before that, I had already built this:
This is the sanderling I made in about 1985 and to build it, I brought back from England a set of fuselage shells I bought from David Bond. They were some "roughies" from down the back of the garden and I went to fibreglass night school for a year to learn how to make moulds from them.
As well as the fuselage shells, I also bought a set of Lambert DN plans from Bertrand at the '83 Europeans in Ireland and built that yacht first and then transferred all the bits to the new fuselage when it was ready.
That was actually the second DN I had made, the first I built a few years before from some plans from Kambalda.
Any way, the sanderling was the yacht I started with when I decided to have a crack at playing with a wing.
...........And this is what I came up with. 
...........And this is what I came up with.
The front runner plank was lengthened to make the wheelbase to back axle 1.3 times the rear track for best handling and I used one of the rear wheels for the front end.
The wing is simply pretty much what you see, which is an ally tube mast with diamond shaped ribs made of ply, foam stuck on that and then the whole lot was hot wired with Dad's birdman rally hot wire, powered by a welder.
This dictated the spacings for the ribs as the hotwire was only a bit of nichrome wire now and then with copper wire for the rest.
after the foam was cut, there was a strip of balsa glued onto the edges of the foam to provide a surface for doublesided tape to attach the mylar covering.
At Lake Finnis , where this was taken, I made a run to the fence about 5 k's away in about 4 minutes and I reckon it must have got close to 120kmh or so.
When I first got it cranked up, it was slow to get going at first but once it passed the point of being stalled it took off and just kept winding up. I'd never heard stays scream before or realised the wheels were out of balance.
I realised I could just see the fence that crossed the lake ahead of me and went to back off the sheeting (one block and a bit of rope at the back of the wing).
At this point the wing gave one flick of oscillation and spun the yacht out!
Fortunately I managed to hang on until things stopped spinning and I looked out at the fence about 50 ft away!
That's when I decided that if I was going to try to do this I had to build a new yacht to do the job - one that I was more enclosed in and with a more substantial wing and better controls............
Hi Folks,
Its been a while but I thought I should tell the rest of Vindicators story, so I'll start a new thread on construction.
I'm really interested in the build of Vindicator. An enormous amount of dedication there!!!.
I'm loving the description in the construction thread and have commented here, so as not to interrupt your story.
Thankyou.
